Worldwide Nanotechnology Development: A Comparative Study of USPTO, EPO, and JPO Patents

1
Worldwide Nanotechnology Development A
Comparative Study of USPTO, EPO, and JPO Patents

• Yiling Lin
• Advisor Hsinchun Chen
• Dec, 2006

2
Agenda

• Introduction
• Research Design
• Basic Bibliographic Analysis
• Content Map Analysis
• Citation Network Analysis
• Conclusions

3
Introduction

• Nanotechnology
• A fundamental technology.
• Critical for a nations technological competence.
  
• Its RD status attracts various communities
  interest.
• Patent
• A technology document
• An open source
• Strictly structured

4
Introduction

• Patent Offices in the World
• USPTO, EPO and JPO issue nearly 90 percent of the
  worlds patents (Kowalski et al., 2003).
• Language issue
• .

5
Introduction

• Research Objectives
• Assess the nanotechnology development status
  represented by USPTO, EPO, and JPO patents.
• Compare and contrast the differences in the
  nanotechnology patents in the three repositories.

6
Research Design
USPTO dataset
Patent parsing
Data acquisition
Research status analysis
USPTO database
Number of patents
Patent publication
Collected by keywords
EPO dataset
Average number of cites
Patent importance/ strength of a repository
EPO database
EPOJPO patent
Collected by keywords
Topic coverage
Content map
JPO patent
JPO dataset
Citation Network
Knowledge diffusion
Patent status
JPO database
Patent statuschecking
7
Basic Bibliographic Analysis

• Patent publication
• Number of patents by country in each year
• Number of patents by country group in each year
• Number of patents by assignee in each year
• Number of patents by technology field in each
  year
• Patent importance / strength
• Average number of cites by country
• Average number of cites by assignee
• Average number of cites by technology field

8
Content Map Analysis
Documents
Topic Similarity
Visualization
Topics
Topic Relation Analysis
Keyword Extraction
Arizona NounPhraser
SOM Algorithm
9
Topic Map Interface
10
Content Map Analysis (USPTO)

• USPTO Content Map (1976-1989)

11
Content Map Analysis (USPTO)
-0.34 0.08 1.50 1.98 2.40 2.80
3.22 3.69 4.33 4.79 5.54
NEW

REGION
-1.96 -0.75 -0.12 0.35 0.77 1.17
1.59 2.07 2.71 3.17 3.92
NEW

REGION
-0.34 0.08 1.50 1.98 2.40 2.80
3.22 3.69 4.33 4.79 5.54
NEW

REGION

• USPTO Content Map (1990-1999)

• USPTO Content Map (2000-2004)

12
Findings Content Map (USPTO)

• From 1976 to 1989, the major research topics of
  USPTO patents included carbon atoms, laser
  beams, electrodes, coating composition,
  pharmaceutical compositions, electromagnetic
  radiation, and aqueous solutions.
• From 1990 to 1999, pharmaceutical compositions,
  laser beams, aqueous solutions, and carbon
  atoms were still major research topics. New
  research topics included thin films, nucleic
  acids, and semiconductor devices.
• From 2000 to 2004, laser beams, thin film,
  semiconductor devices, pharmaceutical
  compositions, aqueous solutions, nucleic
  acids, and carbon atoms were still major
  research topics. New topics included optical
  fibers, light emitting device, carbon
  nanotubes, barrier layers.

13
Citation Network Analysis

• Analytical unit levels
• countries,
• Institutions
• technology fields.
• The top 100 links of each network are used to
  create the core networks.
• Graphviz, provided by ATT Labs (Gansner and
  North, 2000) (available at http//www.research.at
  t.com/sw/tools/graphviz/).
• Knowledge flow
• For example, a link from Country A to Country
  B means that country As patents had been cited
  by country Bs patents and the number beside the
  link is the total number of these citations.

14
Citation Network Analysis- USPTO Countries
15
Citation Network Analysis- USPTO Technology
Fields (IPC)
16
Citation Network Analysis- USPTO Institutions
17
Conclusions

• The number of patents had an increasing trend. In
  recent years, several countries had a significant
  growth in all repositories.
• The USA filed much more patents in USPTO than in
  other repositories, which shows the country
  effect in patent filing. In both datasets, the US
  filed the majority of patents.
• The European group countries filed similar
  numbers of patents in both USPTO and EPO, which
  shows the significant attraction of the USPTO
  repository to the researchers.
• In USPTO and EPO, the patents published in the
  top technology fields showed upward trends, while
  those in the JPO dataset did not.
• The top 3 technology fields in USPTO also belongs
  to the top 10 lists of EPO and JPO. EPO and JPO
  top 10 lists share many common technology fields.

18
Conclusions

• From the content map analysis, USPTO patents
  cover more topic areas than EPO and JPO.
• Many of the EPO and JPO topics were related to
  research tools/methods.
• Many of the EPO topics were related to physics
  research.
• USPTO topics covered research in physics,
  biomedicine, and electronics.
• The USPTO repository and EPO repository have
  different focuses and strengths in different
  technology fields, in terms of the cites per
  patent measure.
• In the institution citation network, USPTO
  institutions have more self-citations than EPO
  institutions.

19
Future Directions

• Study the inter-citation relationships to
  identify the knowledge diffusion process between
  repositories.
• Study the collaboration of the inventors in the
  three repositories.
• Extend research framework to include more patent
  offices documents.

20
References

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21
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